Noun
Absence of resources; want; privation; indigence; extreme poverty; destitution.
Penuriousness; miserliness.
Source: Webster's dictionaryLife without literature is a life reduced to penury. It expands you in every way. It illuminates what you're doing. It shows you possibilities you haven't thought of. It enables you to live the lives of other people than yourself. It broadens you, it makes you more human. It makes life enjoyable. M. H. Abrams
But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll; Chill Penury repressed their noble rage, And froze the genial current of the soul. Thomas Gray
It is beyond belief that we know so little about how people get rich or poor, about how it is they come to dwell in comfort and health or die in penury and disease. Benoît Mandelbrot
He proved to be one of the four thousand lawyers of Naples, ninety per cent of whom – surplus to the needs of the courts – had never practised, and who for the most part lived in extreme penury. Norman Lewis
The weariest and most loathed worldly life, that age, ache, penury and imprisonment can lay on nature is a paradise, to what we fear of death. William Shakespeare
Extravagance is the luxury of the poor penury is the luxury of the rich. Oscar Wilde